Whiteland’s football team takes the field for the Class 5A state final at Lucas Oil Stadium last November.
Daily Journal file photo
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series taking stock of where each of Johnson County’s high school athletic departments stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. First up is a look at Whiteland, which is going through a massive growth in enrollment and set to upgrade its facilities accordingly over the next few years.
When David Edens graduated from Whiteland in the mid-1990s, it was a Class 3A football school with just over 700 students — not all that different from what Indian Creek is now.
A generation later, Edens presides over the athletic department at the same school — only now, there are more than 2,000 students. In theory, that means more good athletes to choose from, but Edens says that Whiteland’s population boom is a “double-edged sword,” because the Warriors have lost some students whose parents didn’t want their kids going to such a large high school.
The key, he says, is making sure that Whiteland maintains a small-school feel even as it grows into one of the state’s largest.
“The key is, for our coaches, to have a family atmosphere where it doesn’t feel like I’m getting lost in the shuffle,” Edens said. “Like, I can call the coaches or I can email the coaches or fist-bump the coaches at the varsity game or whatever.
“That’s the beauty of sports in general — it gives the kids a place. So really trying to make our community small where we know our kids … so it doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh, it’s 2,000 students and I’m going to get lost; it’s too big.’”
On the plus side, the population growth has spurred a $235 construction project that will include significant upgrades to the current athletic facilities. A new 50-meter swimming pool will be part of the first phase of construction, with new weight room space and new turf baseball and softball fields among the other items to be added as work continues.
That means that Whiteland’s athletic programs will be more equipped to host big events — which also means more revenue generated — instead of being forced to travel to other schools for tournaments.
“I don’t know how it’s going to translate into wins and losses, but I do know how great it’s going to be for our kids,” Edens said. “It just allows kids the opportunity to enhance their training. You can have the most updated technology in everything, which we don’t right now.”
One place where that technology will be most apparent right away will be in the new natatorium, which is expected to span more than 35,000 square feet and cost roughly $18.4 million. Tragedy struck at the school’s current pool in May when 15-year-old student Alaina Dildine drowned while swimming during gym class.
Edens says that while building a new pool can’t change what happened, Dildine’s death is pushing the school district to make sure it has better safety measures in place going forward.
He believes that the larger natatorium will benefit Whiteland as a whole, especially with highly regarded coach John Sincroft leading the charge.
“You can do so many things in the community with a pool that size if you’ve got the right person running it,” Edens said, “and I think we do.”
Sincroft is just one of several newer additions to what Edens believes is one of Whiteland’s core strengths at the moment.
“We have such a solid group of coaches,” Edens said. “Honestly, I would put our coaches up with anybody as far as the time they work, the dedication they have. … So we’re in a good place. I feel like my job is easier now than it was three years ago.”
Whether it’s still easier three years from now is yet to be determined. A 3A school when Edens was a student, Whiteland is highly likely to move up to Class 6A when the IHSAA next reclassifies schools by enrollment a year from now.
With that status as one of thet state’s biggest high schools comes a certain amount of pressure to act like one of the biggest. The Warriors haven’t always done that, perhaps scheduling at times at a level of difficulty that Edens or predecessor Ken Sears felt certain teams were capable of handling. That part may soon be changing.
“It’s a status symbol,” Edens said of the likely eventual move up to 6A. “It puts you in the top 32 schools in the state; you should be performing like a top-32 (school). Your schedule should be a top-32 schedule.
“It will probably create a mentality of, when you are 6A, you just say, ‘Guys, we’ve got to play whoever it is.’ We can’t look for that right game; we’ve just got to play whoever it is.”
If that’s the case, the various Warrior teams will need to level up accordingly.
“You don’t want to be the 6A school that every other 6A school wants to play,” Edens noted.
Becoming a member of the state’s largest class wouldn’t be Whiteland’s only status symbol. The athletic department has put itself on the map with a number of recent successes — most notably its trip to the Class 5A state football final this past November.
The momentum from such a run in one of the most high-visibility sports can last for a long time and in a number of different ways. Edens pointed out that he’s had conversations with move-in families that didn’t even have children playing sports but had heard about the Warriors’ football prowess.
“It’s amazing what a football ride can do for a community and a school,” he said. “We’re still riding that out a little bit.”
As Whiteland’s athletic reputation grows, the hope is that more of the community’s top athletes will choose to stick around and wear blue and orange. There have been several notable cases in recent years of local standouts choosing to attend high school elsewhere, including All-Americans Keagan Rothrock (Roncalli softball) and Caden Curry (Center Grove football), and Edens has made stopping that outflow a top priority.
“That’s the focus, and that is continually the focus — let’s keep our own,” he said. “When you go have a kid that the coaches have put some time into and invested, and they leave, it’s tough. Then you circle back to conversations — what can we do?”
It comes back to maintaining that small-town vibe where every student-athlete feels valued. Edens remembers a conversation with Whiteland graduate Jaime Rasmussen, the 1998 Indiana Miss softball, about how she opted to stay at home and pitch for the Warriors because longtime coach Butch Zike went out of his way to make her feel important.
Edens wants to create an environment where every kid feels that way, not just the future superstars.
“We had the conversation that summer at our coaches’ meeting,” he said. “‘Guys, let’s not give them a choice. Let’s really connect with our kids and give them opportunities to have blue and orange on.’ It hurts when you lose those kids, (but) that’s just the nature of the high school beast these days. That transfer portal mentality’s spreading down. It does hurt, it does harden you and it really does make you circle your wagons and say, ‘We’ve got to do a better job of making sure everything we’re offering our kids, they can’t get any better anywhere else.’”
Within the next few years, there shouldn’t be much that the Warriors can’t offer.
